dissident wrote:careinke wrote:Hey Dissident, please don't take offense, but are you one of those "thousands" of Russian social media trolls, the MSM have been screaming about? Just curious.
Don't get me wrong, you are ALWAYS one of my favorite reads. At the very least, you certainly raise my critical thinking skills. Your comments are always lucid and well thought out. As a matter of fact we agree on LOTS of stuff.
Like you, I think this whole Chem Weapons thing does not ring true. I can see NO advantage to Asad for using chem weapons at this point in time. The current Russian story, seems the most credible at the moment. Although your False Flag hypothesis is certainly intriguing.....
Your question comes from cognitive dissonance. Anyone who is not running with the herd of media-fed lemmings must be some "agent of a foreign" power. My link to Russia and Ukraine is that I have relatives there and I left the USSR during the 1970s. At least I have access to information that clearly contradicts the information bubble being maintained by the western media. They don't lie to you about events at home, but they spew 100% tin foil hat conspiracy theories about Russia.
The western media has zero credibility. They did not cover the massive protests against the 2003 Iraq invasion. Three million people demonstrated against it in Rome alone. Yet they screech that some protest of 20,000 in Moscow is epic in scale. That city has over 17 million residents. CNN and pals described the March 2, 2014 massacre of unarmed protestors who were herded into the Trade Union building in Odessa and burned alive as "some people died in a fire". Those that tried to escape by jumping through windows were beaten to death. Then you bitches whine about Russian meddling after you stage regime change coups around the world.
Maybe you should ask the question to yourself why you still believe that your government and media represent any sort of normalcy and are not a freak show. I get riled up by the brazen, bloody lies and hypocrisy from a collection of mass murdering war criminals posing as agents of goodness and the guiding light of humanity. You call this paid trolling. This makes you an accomplice to the butchers.
M_B_S wrote:ISIL takes advantage of US attack on government to storm western Palmyra
SeaGypsy wrote:My American family has the same roots- Pennsylvania 'Dutch'. 8 generations in the US & right down to my father fluent in German. He signed up for the US Army in 1962 & was sent immediately to Berlin as Military Police.
Fox News wrote:US drops largest non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan after Green Beret killed
The U.S. military dropped its largest non-nuclear bomb on an ISIS tunnel complex in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday, a U.S. defense official confirmed to Fox News.
The GBU-43B, a 21,000-pound conventional bomb, was deployed in Nangarhar Province close to the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. By comparison, each Tomahawk cruise missile launched at a Syrian military air base last week weighed 1,000 pounds each.
The MOAB -- Massive Ordnance Air Blast -- is also known as the “Mother Of All bombs.” It was first tested in 2003, but hadn't been used in combat before Thursday.
Pentagon spokesman Adam Stump said the bomb had been brought to Afghanistan "some time ago" for potential use. The bomb explodes in the air, creating air pressure that can make tunnels and other structures collapse. It can be used at the start of an offensive to soften up the enemy, weakening both its infrastructure and morale.
"As [ISIS'] losses have mounted, they are using IEDs, bunkers and tunnels to thicken their defense," Gen. John Nicholson, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said in a statement. "This is the right munition to reduce these obstacles and maintain the momentum of our offensive against [ISIS]."
President Trump told media Thursday afternoon that "this was another successful mission" and he gave the military total authorization.
Trump was also asked whether dropping the bomb sends a warning to North Korea.
"North Korea is a problem, the problem will be taken care of," said Trump.
WHAT IS THE 'MOTHER OF ALL BOMBS'?
The MOAB had to be dropped out of the back of a U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo plane due to its massive size.
"We kicked it out the back door," one U.S. official told Fox News.
Ismail Shinwari, the governor of Achin district, said the U.S. attack was carried out in a remote mountainous area with no civilian homes nearby and that there had been no reports of injured civilians. He said there has been heavy fighting in the area in recent weeks between Afghan forces and ISIS militants.
The strike came just days after a Green Beret was killed fighting ISIS in Nangarhar, however, a U.S. defense official told Fox News the bombing had nothing to do with that casualty.
“It was the right weapon for the right target, and not in retaliation,” the official said.
The U.S. estimates that between 600 to 800 ISIS fighters are present in Afghanistan, mostly in Nangarhar. The U.S. has concentrated heavily on combatting them while also supporting Afghan forces battling the Taliban.
In August, a company of nearly 150 Army Rangers killed "hundreds" of ISIS fighters in Nangarhar, though five of the Rangers were shot. Some weapons and equipment, including communications gear and a rocket launcher, were also left behind following the operation.
Fox News' Martin Hinton and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Slate wrote:So, what about this Mother of All Bombs? Last Tuesday, the U.S. Air Force tested a new and very powerful weapon called the Massive Ordnance Air Blast. The resulting acronym, MOAB, spells out the more colorful title as well—no doubt, deliberately so, as a snarling in-joke reference to the "mother of all battles" that Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf waged against Iraq in '91. Was MOAB, in fact, tailor-made for the impending Gulf War II? How will it be used, against what sorts of targets? And just how big a Mother is it?
First, it's big, but not that big. On the night of the test, ABC News reported that the bomb was "similar to a small nuclear weapon."Time magazine, in strikingly similar language, reported that it "packs the punch of a small nuclear weapon." Let's do the math. The MOAB weighs 21,000 pounds, including 18,000 pounds' worth of high explosives. That's 9 tons. The teeniest nuclear weapon in the U.S. stockpile has the blast-power of 1,000 tons (one kiloton, in the parlance). In other words, had Time's reporter been a bit less giddy, he would have written that MOAB (which, by the way, the Air Force pronounces "mo-ab") "packs one one-hundredth the punch of a small nuclear weapon."
Nor does such a big conventional bomb mark any great technological achievement. During World War II, Britain's Royal Air Force built a 22,000-pound bomb called the Grand Slam, which Lancaster bombers dropped on Nazi U-boat pens. The U.S. Army Air Force built a 44,000-pound bomb, called the T-12 Cloudmaker, though the war ended before it was used. (Again, by comparison, the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima released the explosive energy of 13,000 tons, or 26,000,000 pounds.)
Still, 18,000 pounds is a lot for a conventional bomb that falls from the sky. It is, by the Air Force's own labeling, a "massive ordnance" (even if by no stretch a weapon of mass destruction). It delivers about 10 times the blast of most U.S. Air Force and Navy bombs ("smart" or otherwise). It's about one-fifth larger than the BLU-82 "Daisy Cutters," which, at 15,000 pounds, were until now the most powerful bombs in the U.S. non-nuclear arsenal.
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